Ambleside Home Guard artist

Gilbert Spencer recorded the Home Guard as a War Artist in The Lake District.

Gilbert was the Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art in 1940 when the College was evacuated from London to Ambleside. There Gilbert joined the Home Guard.

He suggested that the local Home Guard unit was a  appropriate subject to the War Artists Advisory Committee and he became a War Artist. These pictures are some of his watercolours.

Home Guard

Spencer later called the Home Guard:

‘a brilliant stratagem on the part of the government to make us behave so ridiculously, and yet succeed in making us immensely proud of what we were doing!’

Spencer was born in Cookham inBerkshire. He was the younger brother of the better–known Stanley Spencer.

WW1 service

Gilbert attended the Slade School of Fine Art between 1913-1915. During WW1 he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonika.

He served as an official war artist from 1940 to 1943. Between 1948 and 1950, he was the Head of Department of painting and drawing at the Glasgow School of Art and in 1950 was elected an associate of the Royal Academy.

There are more of Gilbert's wonderful watercolours at http://www.gilbertspencer.org/art-collections/home-guard-watercolours/

Gilbert died in 1979.

Peter Green